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A careful reading of Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince and of Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree uncovers a joint fantasy: real parental devotion leads to a self-annihilation of the parent. This fantasy appears directly in von Trier's film, Dancing in the Dark, and is ironically illuminated in a short story of the Israeli author, Etgar Keret. In sublimated ways, a similar fantasy appears in psychoanalysis too, in developmental models which focus on the child's needs but bypass the parent's subjectivity, and in clinical models which expect the analyst to merge with the patient, become merely a selfobject, and abandon one's separate subjectivity.
The dilemmas involved are traced, starting with Ferenczi's work, in which a tension appears between a wish for total dedication to one's patients, and a growing awareness of the unavoidable mutual conflictuality in the analyst-analysand dyad, and the crucial role of its working through. Other authors whose work is discussed include Racker, Win- nicott, Bollas, Benjamin, and theorists who attempt to reconcile Kohut's legacy with intersubjective thinking, such as Stolorow, Bacal and Tonnesvang.